| Lemonade Stand Raises $10K to Fight Dad’s Cancer Posted: 18 Apr 2012 03:02 PM PDT 
A young entrepreneur is trying to help his dad fight a rare form of cancer – and he hasn’t even finished kindergarten. CBS 19’s Abby Broyles shows how a six-year old boy started his own business from his home in Gladewater to help pay for his dad’s cancer treatments. He’s six years old, he has a big heart, and a community behind him. The six year old set up a lemonade stand and within a day had sold $0.25 worth of lemonade and paper cups for $10,000. Cause based marketing at it’s finest. Photo by Hannamariah/ShutterStock. 
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| Funny Ad of the Day: Golf at the Funeral Parlor Posted: 18 Apr 2012 02:56 PM PDT 
Putt-putt golf into the afterlife! via Criggo. 
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| A Calculator That Requires You to Estimate Before It Gives You The Answer Posted: 18 Apr 2012 01:44 PM PDT 
This calculator might have a future in our underperforming schools: From the moment pupils start using calculators they stop using their heads – for all quantitative work. The detrimental effect on maths education is well known. Calculators, however, cannot be removed from classrooms anymore- they are indispensible because many results can only be received from calculators (e.g. root7, cosine70 etc.) This serious problem, therefore, require an inventive solution: A calculator into which one enters anything one would enter into normal (also scientific) calculators, but when the ‘=’ key is pressed nothing happens: The user must also enter a mental estimate, and if the calculator appraises the estimate as reasonable for the respective calculation – only then it shows the precise answer. In classrooms where QAMA is the admissible calculator, students will no longer touch a calculator without using their heads too. The name QAMA derives from Quick Approximate Mental Arithmetic, but QAMA also happens to be a word in Hebrew. It means: “How Much?” 
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| Gas Stations Are Hurt By High Oil Prices Posted: 18 Apr 2012 01:41 PM PDT 
It turns out that gas stations don’t make much money from selling you gasoline. They make only pennies per gallon sold. Most of the profit, about 75%, comes from the markups on convenience store items such as sunglasses, hot food or medicine, according to the Associated Food and Petroleum Dealers, or AFPD, a trade association of independent operators. Seems like they’re doing it all wrong. If gasoline is the loss leader to get people to stop in a buy some sunglasses, perhaps they should differentiate themselves by providing different profitless products and services. Photo by CREATISTA/ShutterStock. 
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| Zip Line Company Makes a Million Posted: 18 Apr 2012 01:23 PM PDT 
CNN Money: Ken Stamps spotted a business idea thousands of miles from his Michigan home, in rainforest-rich Costa Rica, where a popular tourist attraction sends travelers soaring through the treetops on a pulley. “There are far fewer Costa Rica-type canopy tours in the U.S.,” said Stamps. In contrast, most American zip-lining companies are at manmade attractions, such as theme parks or water parks and not in a tree canopy. After 27 years in the architecture and engineering industry near Detroit, Stamps was hungry for a career change. In 2009, he launched — with partners Sam and John Walker, a father-son team — Navitat Canopy Adventures, a zip-lining-tour company in densely wooded areas it leases in Asheville, N.C.; and Wrightwood, Calif. 
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| Today in Entrepreneurial History: April 18 Posted: 18 Apr 2012 11:29 AM PDT 
If it wasn’t for the crossword puzzle book that Simon & Schuster introduced in 1924, I’d say that just like this day in 1930, nothing much has ever happened on April 18. Newslite has more on the day without any news: On April 18, 1930, during what should have been a 6:30pm radio news bulletin, that’s exactly what happened. A BBC presenter announced “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” It had been apparently judged that nothing newsworthy had happened. Piano music was then played instead of the current affairs update for a couple of minutes, before normal scheduling resumed. 
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| Cold-Buster: From Disaster To Success Posted: 18 Apr 2012 04:30 AM PDT 
Edmonton Journal: Initially designed as a fast and efficient way for Canadian soldiers to fight off hypothermia, the Cold-Buster – the culmination of 18 years of research using more than $1 million in funding – was promising to become a success with athletes and backcountry enthusiasts. But three days into the new year, Wang’s world came crashing down. A handful of poisoned bars had been sent to the Edmonton Journal, The Canadian Press and Calgary Herald. In a letter attached to the tampered products, a group calling itself the Animal Rights Militia announced it was launching a “New Year’s offensive against animal abuse.” On the 20th anniversary of that campaign, the Cold-Buster, now sold as the Access Bar, is still on the market and royalties from the patent, which is about to expire, have made Wang a wealthy man. But instead of retiring as he could have in 2005, Wang devotes himself to environmental causes. For the past 12 years, he and a group of volunteer scientists from the University of Alberta and elsewhere have helped Chinese peasants transform badly degraded land into environmentally friendly, sustainable and economically productive assets.
How can you turn a downfall into a positive for your business? 
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| The Need For Social Entrepreneurs Posted: 18 Apr 2012 04:00 AM PDT The Huffington Post: The bracing happy talk at social investment conferences and cheerleading predictions about social investment capital poised to flood into the developing world begs for a reality check. Meet Liberia-born Chid Liberty, Founder & Chief Executive of Liberty & Justice. For the iOnPoverty cameras, he described the raw truth about impact investing. “People are very attracted to social entrepreneurship right now. They spend a lot of money flying to conferences all over the world to talk about how great an idea social entrepreneurship is, but, when it comes to check writing time, they start coming up with reasons not to write the check.” “At some point, if we want to create something [good] in places like Africa, Asia, India, we need to take some very serious risks,” he soberly adds. To start his social enterprise, Chid tossed a solid Silicon Valley career with a great salary, a nice car, a comfortable place to live in swanky Sausalito, Calif., and a seemingly endless capacity for late night drinking with his buddies. He talks about those days as essentially fooling himself about his happiness, but even then sensing the “seeds of misery.”
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